New voices

... urge IPCC chief to step down. To Hartmut Grassl, any conflicts of interest, real or perceived, could still undermine the credibility of the panel. The former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg told Deutsche Welle that this "mixing of duties makes [Pachauri] vulnerable."

The Discover magazine writer Chris Mooney sees it as a guerrilla war.

... what I and many others failed to anticipate was that a kind of guerilla war on science–and especially climate science–would take its place, driven by blogs like Climate Depot and Watts Up With That. This war springs from the same politics, but it is coming from those who are out in the wilderness, rather than running the government.

As a result, this war hits harder, and is much more personal—aimed at discrediting individual researchers, by sifting through their emails and accusing them of scandalous wrongdoing. And it is draws its momentum from the vast numbers of online commenters who closely follow the climate "scandal" stories and then show up at this blog, and other ones, to leave comments attacking scientists like Mann, and institutions like the IPCC.

After trying to ignore the issue, even Richard Black of the BBC is wobbling. On the back of "Climategate", it's nearly two months since this started and it's showing no signs of abating. I think it's got to the stage where only a blood sacrifice is going to resolve it.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD